Short Articles on Weight Loss

Diet "Slowdown"

Diet slowdown is real. Here's what's really going on.

The term "diet slowdown" just means that when you are losing weight at a certain rate -- for example at the rate of two pounds per week -- then the thinner you get, the harder it gets to keep losing weight at that same two pounds per week rate. Usually your rate of weight loss slows down -- for example, to maybe one pound per week -- even though you are not eating any more food and you are doing the same amount of exercise.

The reason for this is no mystery. If you are (e.g.) 50 pounds overweight, your body has to burn a lot of Calories every day just to keep that 50-pound mass of fat cells alive and move it around with you.  (Think of carrying a 50 pound pack on your back all day long.)  If you're only 5 pounds overweight, it takes one tenth as many Calories to do the same thing. So your body isn't working as hard and doesn't burn off as many Calories doing it.

You can calculate the Calorie-burning effect of this this from standard tables.

As an example, here are two different calculations for a 30 year old male who has an "office worker" activity level (very light) and doesn't do any exercise.

The difference is 450 Calories per day, which is the number of extra Calories this person's body uses just by virtue of having 50 extra pounds to drag around all day.

This gives heavy people a huge advantage when they start a diet -- they lose weight much faster in the beginning -- but that advantage shrinks at the same rate that they do and this can be frustrating if they don't know why it's happening.

The best way (but not the only way) to handle this phenomenon as you lose the weight is to increase the amount of voluntary exercise you do. For example, simply taking a brisk walk outdoors for an hour a day can burn almost 450 Calories, as this Calorie-Burn table shows. [Use browser "back button" to return here.]

If you would like to recalculate the above numbers using your own weight, you can do it with the standard tables starting here. [Use browser "back button" to return here.]